A swansong for outgoing director Christoph Terhechte, the 68th edition of DOK Leipzig made a strong case that politically engaged, formally inventive, intellectually ambitious cinema can still play a critical role in troubled times.
Ivan Ramljak’s much-lauded ‘Peacemaker’ wins DOK Leipzig’s documentary competition while Seth and Peter Scriver’s delightfully bizarre family ruckus ‘Endless Cookie’ takes home the Golden Dove in the animated competition.
Ron Rothschild’s self-interrogating documentary ‘A Jewish Problem’ weaves his Jewish Israeli-German family memory into a fearless meditation on how Jewish trauma, European guilt, and Palestinian erasure continue to mirror one another.
History and colonialism form the basis for Gregor Brändli’s engrossing ‘Elephants & Squirrels’, screened at DOK Leipzig.
Funny and compelling, if slightly glib, Ole Juncker’s fast-paced documentary ‘Take the Money and Run’ chronicles the case of a Danish artist who stole a hefty chunk of gallery money, arguing in court that the theft was a conceptual art statement.
Ugandan poet, political activist and professional troublemaker Stella Nyanzi is the explosively charismatic subject of director Patience Nitumwesiga’s assured debut feature ‘The Woman Who Poked the Leopard’.
Srdan Kovacevic’s inspirational ‘fists in the air’ documentary ‘The Thing to Be Done’ offers a close-up on a small workers’ advisory office in Slovenia where a ‘parallel world’ for labour rights could exist.
Paleontology comes to the screen from a child’s point of view in Marcel Barelli’s family-oriented feature debut ‘Mary Anning’.
A delightfully bizarre ruckus of wild family anecdote, the Scriver brothers’ animation is an astute catalogue of Canadian First Nations dispossession, and a hopeful contribution to resurgent knowledge.
A Russian teacher re-enacts her denunciation by one of her own students in director Yulia Lokshina’s ‘Active Vocabulary’, a flawed but ambitious documentary about free speech, propaganda and state indoctrination of schoolchildren.
This multiple prize-winning documentary is an inspirational close-up portrait of a proudly rebellious woman fighting for gender equality in a deeply traditional region of Iran, making powerful enemies along the way.
The 68th edition of the world’s longest-running documentary festival promises an all-inclusive Oktoberfest of high art and heavyweight issues, critical thinking and serious fun.
French Nobel winner Annie Ernaux’s writing becomes a prism for the minds of a new generation in Claire Simon’s deceptively simple, insightful and expansive doc.